The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender

  It took all night for the bakery to fill with the aroma of freshly baked bread, but, no matter, no one had any intention of leaving. Besides, where would they go? Every once in a while, they would look up from their particular tasks, their faces smudged with flour, and catch in another’s eyes the look of despair. Then Trouver would shift in his sleep or Henry would start to hum, and the bakers would return to their work.

  Outside, the crowd around Pinnacle Lane grew larger, the wet street bulging with neighbors who’d heard of the attack. For reasons they themselves couldn’t fully explain, each felt compelled to pay their respects. They battled the pelting rain in their Oldsmobile Sedans, their Studebaker Starliners, their Ford Model B pickups with the family dog sniffing the wet air in the bed of the truck. They gathered around Pinnacle Lane, spilling down the street and into the neighboring yards. They kept clear the place in the street stained by the black mark that was once Nathaniel Sorrows. They came with their children, their wives and husbands, their parents. They came dressed as if coming to church or to a funeral, or as if coming straight from bed, which most of them did. They came with tents and umbrellas, hats and gloves; they came with nothing at all, not even a jacket to protect them from the rain. By dawn a donation box had been set on the counter at the bakery, and people solemnly offered their spare change in exchange for a slice of bread, a warm croissant. The rain continued to fall. And still, the people kept coming.

  Some brought with them their Bibles — the passages they thought most poignant underlined in red. Some sat in silent circles and walked their fingers around strands of beads in unplanned unison. Others brought along mats to kneel on as soothing chants rose from their throats. As water poured over their upturned faces, their prayers were sent to the sky. They weren’t prayers for forgiveness or salvation. They weren’t sent in gratitude for the angel walking among the wretched human race. They weren’t for the soul of a deformed and cursed half-human creature who lived at the end of Pinnacle Lane. They were, quite simply, prayers said for a girl.

  For me.

  Viviane opened her eyes to a white hospital room. The morning sun peeked mildly through the bare window. She stretched out her legs, cramped from spending the night tucked beneath the metal folding chair, and glanced up at the nurse quietly entering the room. I moaned softly from my hospital bed. Thick, large bandages covered the gaping wounds on my back; a needle dripped cold liquid into my arm. A thick strip of gauze had been wrapped around my head. Emilienne was asleep in another chair next to the bed, her head leaning against the wall, her open mouth tipped toward the ceiling.

  “There’s coffee in the waiting room,” the nurse offered. “Just made a fresh pot.”

  My mother closed her eyes as the nurse pulled back the bandages, revealing the gruesome, haphazard gashes across my shoulder blades. She swallowed a sudden wave of nausea. “No. I’m fine.”

  The nurse raised her eyebrows. “Honey, after the night you’ve had, nobody would blame you for not being fine. Go get some fresh air. We’ll still be here when you come back.”

  In the waiting room, Viviane found the pot of coffee, as well as Gabe asleep in a chair, his chin resting against his chest. With his long legs stretched out in front of him, his feet nearly reached the windows across the room.

  Viviane dropped into the seat beside him, noting the days’ worth of stubble across his cheek, the lines of worry newly formed around his mouth. One hand rested in his lap; the other on the chair’s armrest, the fingers curled away from the palm as if waiting for Viviane to lace her fingers with his. Viviane looked at the hand, the jagged fingernails, the white calluses, the cuticles permanently lined in black. She found his life line, the long crevice pointing away from his thumb, a nod to the years Gabe had spent traveling before coming to Seattle. The arc in the head line meant a creative mind, the star at the base of the fate line meant success. His heart line was long and curved, and she traced it with her eyes over and over again. A person with a curved heart line was a person capable of great warmth and kindness, a person willing to give their whole selves to love, no matter the cost.

  Viviane reached over and threaded her fingers through Gabe’s. If I’d only looked down sooner, she thought, I would have seen that everything I ever needed was here, in this hand.

  Gabe’s eyes fluttered open at Viviane’s touch. He smiled wearily, wrapping his fingers around hers. “How’s our girl?” he asked.

  “Alive.”

  “Well, that’s something.”

  “Is it? I thought I was protecting her. It never dawned on me that she could live like everyone else. Now that I know she can, it feels like it’s too late.”

  Gabe pulled Viviane to him. “Henry?” she asked.

  “With Wilhelmina,” he replied. “Emilienne?”

  “With Ava. Hasn’t left her side since last night.”

  “Stranger things have happened.”

  Viviane nodded. A moment passed. “That man. The one I almost hit with the truck? It was him, wasn’t it?” With a shudder, she remembered the monstrous ghosts in the road.

  Gabe shook his head. “I can’t be sure. But nobody’s seen him. They found poor Marigold Pie up in one of the bedrooms. She’d been drugged. For how long, no one seems sure. Months maybe.”

  Viviane sighed. “I feel like the whole world’s been tipped on its axis. Just walking upright feels like too much today.”

  Gabe pulled her closer. “You just lean on me, Vivi. I’ll keep us both upright for a while.”

  Many would have typically preferred the rains to appear more gradually — say, as a warm spring shower typical of April or in the shape of a dense fog, the air clinging wet to eyelashes and nostrils. But when the rain persisted throughout the summer months and well into September, they hardly complained and instead wrapped cellophane around their good shoes to protect them from the mud along the sidewalks. They knew that rain meant green lawns, fall foliage, and chrysanthemums for the church altar on Sunday mornings. Wistful thoughts of that spring without rain came and went on occasion, when, for example, the mail carrier grew tired of sorting sodden letters, or Penelope Cooper became listless at the sight of the bakery floor streaked with mud yet again. But then that weariness would pass, and they would join their neighbors in a collected sigh of relief at the piles of wet fall leaves gathering in the street.

  My mother remained at the hospital for the length of my stay. She refused to leave even for a change of clothes. After that first night, she coaxed the nurse to bring in a cot so that she could stay in the room with me. She was surprised when the nurse brought in not one, but two. She was even more surprised when she found out the other cot was for Emilienne.

  Emilienne sat down on the cot before glancing up at her daughter. “What? Did you want this one?”

  “No,” Viviane said, shaking her head. “I’m a little confused as to what you’re doing.”

  “I’m staying as well.”

  Viviane raised her eyebrows. “Why?”

  “Because —” Emilienne’s voice broke. “Because I’m your mother, that’s why.”

  And so it was.

  WE RETURNED TO THE HOUSE at the end of Pinnacle Lane barely three months after the summer solstice. Gabe carefully placed me on my bed, and my grandmother covered me with a quilt her maman made many years before. Emilienne willed herself not to weep, but I saw it in her face. The gauze hid my sutures well enough, so she didn’t have to stare at the stitchery holding my frail body together. But the bruises would not be hidden. They seeped down my sides, across my arms and hips, down the backs of my legs. And the color — so dark they weren’t purple, but red. The very color of violence.

  Those deep-red bruises called to mind the faint brown mark Jack’s kiss had left on her daughter Viviane’s neck so many years ago. They also made her think of René’s lovely face after William Peyton shot it off, of the hole in Margaux’s chest where her heart once beat, and of all the scars love’s victims carry. Then she would have to leave the room.
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  My grandmother felt no rush to return to the bakery. She could hardly will herself to cook enough to keep her own family fed, not that anyone cared. The appetite of my whole family had dwindled enough so that each ate only when the gnawing pains of hunger fired in their bellies. And even then, they did so without gusto, taking a fork to a neighbor’s cold pan of macaroni and cheese left in the fridge. No one paid any attention to where the food came from, just that it was there.

  Something had happened to Emilienne. She could not summon the strength she once had, no matter how hard she tried. While she waited for some sign of life to return to my eyes, it was my mother who held the family together.

  Wilhelmina and Penelope were more than capable of running the bakery on their own. They added a popular pastry to the menu; in honor of me, they sold the feuilletage on Sundays. They even hired another baker to replace Emilienne. They hired my mother.

  The bakery was exactly as Viviane remembered it: the walls the same golden shade of yellow, the black-and-white-tiled floor still impeccably shined. When Wilhelmina handed her an apron and pointed her toward the oven, Viviane was hardly stunned by how quickly she recalled the trick to a good pear tarte tatin or how to make crème brûlée. Soon her chocolate éclairs were deemed just as good as Emilienne’s.

  It shamed her to admit it, but Viviane relished her hours in the bakery, away from the awful odor of misery and despair that wafted through the hallways of our house. It was so strong that my mother often covered her nose with a handkerchief just to walk by my room. They had to hire a nurse to change my bandages. What happened to me was so horrible, Viviane tried not to think about it, often tried not to think at all. Instead, she filled her time with menial tasks, like baking bread and pastries, which she always brought home to serve after my lunch.

  Back in our kitchen, my mother folded a paper napkin in half and placed it under a plate of warm bread pudding drizzled with chocolate sauce and topped with a scoop of vanilla ice cream. She watched the ice cream melt into a plate-size puddle. Viviane heard the soft tread of footsteps behind her as Cardigan made her way down the stairs from my room and into the kitchen.

  “Is she hungry?” Viviane asked halfheartedly.

  Cardigan shook her head. Out of all of us, Cardigan had changed the most since my attack. She’d let her hair grow out from its stylish bob so that it hung at her shoulders in natural waves; occasionally she threw it in a haphazard ponytail just to get it out of her face. She rarely wore makeup anymore. The first time Viviane saw Cardigan without it, Viviane hadn’t recognized her. The makeup had made her glamorous, untouchable even; without it, Cardigan was pretty but in a less obvious way. Her lashes, blond like her hair, were barely visible around her blue eyes, and her lips were a pale shade of pink and much thinner without the usual swipe of rich red lipstick. She dressed differently, often coming to the house in her brother’s old work boots and a pair of oversize jeans. She was enrolled in honors classes and was secretly planning on taking over Rowe’s old delivery job in October once she passed her driver’s test.

  “Heard anything from my brother?” Cardigan asked Viviane. Rowe had left for school a month ago, and not a day had gone by without the mail bringing a letter addressed to me. My mother gathered he wrote to me more often than to his own family. He’d tried calling on the phone a few times, but I had barely spoken four words in the past few months. So Rowe stuck to the post. At first Viviane wasn’t sure what to do with the letters, so she just piled them up on my bedside table.

  Viviane pointed to the brown envelope on the kitchen table. Cardigan swooped it up and pressed it to her nose. “I told him I’d whale on him if he ever sent her a perfumed love letter.”

  Viviane laughed. She was glad Cardigan hadn’t lost her sense of humor completely.

  “What’s the assignment this week?” Viviane asked, nodding to the book in Cardigan’s hand.

  “The Scarlet Letter. I’m reading it to Ava so she won’t fall behind.” Cardigan turned toward the stairs. “Don’t you think that’s a good idea?” she added quietly.

  Viviane nodded. She’d spoken about my enrollment in the high school with her old teacher Ignatius Lux, now the high-school principal, earlier that summer. Ignatius was a large, barrel-chested man with the tangled mop of red hair that went well with his name. Due to his size, his students considered him a fearsome force. Some even feared the Lux more than they feared their own parents. But Ignatius Lux was actually very soft-hearted, so much so it often embarrassed his wife, and the big man had wept — literally wept! — ​when he’d heard what had happened to me. So when Viviane stopped by to set up an appointment, the principal immediately ushered her into his office, offering her a cup of coffee and instructing his secretary to clear the rest of the day’s meetings. Ignatius had always liked Viviane — years ago, when she was just a spunky student in his class, he had thought, Now, there’s someone who could probably do just about anything.

  Ignatius was impressed, but not surprised, by how closely Viviane’s curriculum matched that of the school. He assured her they would save a spot for me in the fall enrollment.

  Viviane placed her coffee cup on the principal’s desk. “Considering the severity of her . . . condition, I don’t think any of us are expecting her to fully recover before the spring term.”

  Ignatius stammered an apology and gave his word that I could register for classes whenever I was ready. After the meeting Viviane had gone back to her truck and cried, not knowing that only thirty feet away, with his head resting on his big principal’s desk, Ignatius Lux was doing the same thing.

  Viviane walked outside to where Gabe sat on the porch swing watching Henry collect insects in the yard. She handed Gabe the two glasses of lemonade in her hands before lowering herself into the crook of his arm, then took the second glass and wrapped his now-free hand around her shoulder.

  “Any change?” Gabe asked.

  Viviane shook her head wearily. “No. No change.”

  Gabe kneaded the sore muscles in Viviane’s neck with his long fingers until the tension she held there began to fade. Viviane had been surprised by how quickly her body responded to his, how the lines of where she ended and he began seemed to melt whenever they touched. It felt natural for him to share her bed, to spend his nights asleep on her pillow. But the best part was that after twenty-seven years, Viviane was finally free of Jack Griffith — a feat so miraculous that sometimes Viviane wanted to call it out from the rooftops just to hear the echo.

  “Where’s Emilienne?” Gabe asked suddenly. “Asleep again?”

  “Yes.”

  Since the night of the solstice, the hours my grandmother spent awake had dwindled to only a few a day. Even when I was still in the hospital, it was common for Viviane to walk in on her sleeping daughter and mother, me in the bed and Emilienne in the chair next to it, her graying hair spilling from the chignon twisted against the paper-thin skin at the nape of her neck.

  Henry looked up from the grass, proudly holding up some multi-legged or winged insect trapped in between the mesh sides of the bug catcher. “See?” he called.

  Since the night of the solstice, Henry spoke less and less. They tried not to let it discourage them — there was enough of that to go around already. Viviane assumed it had to do with my condition, but the truth was that Henry now found very little worth talking about. And he only talked when what he had to say was really important. That was the rule.

  The day they brought me home from the hospital, Viviane had found a large unmarked envelope leaning up against the front door. Inside were two sizable checks — one made out to me, the other to Henry. Trapped in the envelope glue was a strand of copper-colored hair. As far as Viviane knew, Laura Lovelorn had returned to her beloved eastern Washington as soon as her separation from Jack Griffith was official.

  “The world is definitely changing,” Viviane murmured. Gabe gave her shoulder a squeeze.

  Gabe often teased Viviane about the bare ring finger on her left ha
nd, implying, in his own gentle way, how much he wanted to marry her. She knew she would spend the rest of her nights dreaming beside the gentle giant, his chest pressed against her back, his palm lightly cupping her hip. But she also knew that she would never marry. Not Gabe or anyone else. What use did the heart have for jewelry anyway? To use her words.

  Through the fall, I lay in bed with my stomach pressed against the mattress as I had since the day I was brought home from the hospital. The days and nights meshed together, forming a heavy black shroud that covered my eyes, my nose, my mouth, until I could no longer remember what it was like to feel the sun on my face. When the leaves began to change, my mother asked Gabe to move the bed so that, by turning my head to the side, I could look out the window. But when the leaves turned from green to brown, and I watched them fall to the ground to rot, I found they only reminded me of death.

  By December the rains had calmed; the gray storm clouds that some suspected would never pass did, and winter arrived, carrying with it mornings of icy roads and icy car windows, and only a few scattered showers. Snow would come later, in January and February, catching them all by surprise when they awoke to a city draped in white.

  December 21 marked the winter solstice. It also marked the six-month anniversary of my attack and the auspicious death of Nathaniel Sorrows. For the first time ever, Pinnacle Lane recognized the winter pagan holiday, though it was in somber, solemn tones.

  Those days I often thought about death, often wondered what it might be like to die with such intensity that I could feel the edges of my body melt away, as if I were already a decomposing corpse. I imagined that being dead would feel a lot like those days when the nurse gave me a chalky white pill that left me so numb, the hours melted away like morning ice on a window. Like I was nothing at all but an insignificant shadow, a whisper, a drop of rain left to dry on the pavement.

  But while the thought of being dead seemed appealing, the actual act of dying did not. Dying required too much action. And if recent events proved anything, my body wasn’t going to give over to death without a fierce fight; so if I were to kill myself, I’d have to make sure I could do it. That I’d be good and dead once it was all over and not mutilated or half deranged but still dreadfully alive. I thought of collecting handfuls of those chalky white pills, of hiding them in my cheek and stuffing them under the mattress, later washing them down in one gulp with a glass of cold tap water. I thought of sneaking into the kitchen for a steak knife sharp enough that a single slice to just one wrist would suffice — I wasn’t sure I could try to kill myself twice. I thought often of jumping from the rickety widow’s walk on the roof of the house. If it weren’t for my constant visitors, those thoughts might very well have led to some dark and dreadful act. Perhaps this was the very reason those constant visitors were there.